Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime

The exhibition and program “Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime” is staged as a set for a forthcoming anthology film of the same name, set in Kampala, Kigali, Lubumbashi, and New York. Central to the exhibition is an audiovisual playlist, presented in the form of an extended musical trailer. The collaborative playlist remixes historic love songs and introduces new ones, which Nyampeta sees as sediments of impossible loves unleashed by a time in which displacement and extermination form essential technologies of how today’s world has come to be. Against this, the exhibition debuts sculptures that bear witness to the promises and the contradictions of collective memory, produced through remixing near and distant spaces and times that would otherwise never meet.

The exhibition also features personal takes on the cooperative „un/chrono/logical timeline“, a pedagogical instrument developed by the Another Roadmap School Africa Cluster, of which Nyampeta is an active member. Nyampeta makes storyboards from existing and new drawings, photographs, archival material, and the artist’s own translations. With this, the exhibition is a procession through layers of memories that are sometimes contradictory despite all being true. “Lovers in a Dangerous Spacetime” is an iteration of École du soir, Nyampeta’s pedagogical experiment. The exhibition marks a shift in his practice which, since 2012, has studied how people live in the wake of radical ruptures. Lovers proposes the diasporic as a planetary condition of existence applicable also to those who remain in their native lands, and it considers new models of globalism based in reparation and the possibility of a common world in an age dominated
by difference.

Artistic director: Vera Lauf

Artist: Christian Nyampeta